Customer Reviews

Slow Burn: The Great American Antismoking Scam (And Why It Will Fail)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Though written in a conversational and highly accessible tone, this exhaustively-researched book exposes the wildly misleading conclusions drawn by the anti-tobacco fanatics, based on their junk science "studies" and other misinformation. One of the book's most useful revelations is that the "400,000 deaths from tobacco per year" factoid, which "everybody know is true," did not come from medical records or post-mortem examinations, but is rather a statistical projection that resides in a computer! It is no better and no worse than the assumptions upon which it is based, but any statistician can tell you that mere correlations do not prove causality. (For example, the fact that more people die in hospitals than anywhere else does not "prove" that hospitals are the leading "cause" of death!) I am a lifelong non-smoker, but when I hear the anti-tobacco nuts raving, I don't mind telling you that I feel personally threatened. Whose life is it, anyway? I'd like to tell them to keep their damned hands off MY health! For those who feel as I do, this book is a must.

So much has been written about the smoking controversy, I thought I would just scan Don Oakley's book, but soon found myself reading every word and not wanting to put it down. He writes in a conversational style that makes you feel he's speaking personally to you, as he would in a letter to a friend.

Oakley's natural wit and entertaining style make the facts that he presents throughout the book anything but boring. You will laugh and sometimes shake your head at some of the stories he tells of real events, along with letters and e-mails from real people. He describes the antismoking crusade as "a monumental scam that the antismoking establishment has perpetrated on a trusting public."

Oakley has done his homework and has left no stone unturned as he shows how science and statistics can be twisted to fit a political agenda. This book is not only for smokers but also for those non-smokers who remain skeptical about such things as the "deadliness" of secondhand smoke.

It's a must-read for anyone who values truth and fairness and scientific integrity.

This is an extremely well-researched and put together history and critique of the Anti-Smoking Crusade. It is a long and heavy book, but every page is interesting reading. Every comment and fact the author shares is either marked as personal experience or he has the documentation to back it up. He doesn't try to sell anyone on the idea that smoking is good for you; he is only trying to point out how extreme and over the top the actions of the Anti-Smoking Crusade have been. He looks at it from several angles, including the cost to our society of degrading and humiliating a sizable percentage of the population to satisfy a few fanatics. I thought I knew a lot about the phony EPA second-hand smoke studies, but I was wrong. This book fleshes it out in more detail, and gives the back story on the lawsuits against the tobacco companies in Florida. The truth will shock and possibly even hurt you, as it did me. I have always respected the law and the health authorities. When you find out the truth, it shakes the foundations of what you thought you knew about our culture and way of life. This book was published in 1999 and Mr. Oakley could see the War on Fat coming even back then. In mid-2002, I can see the same pattern emerging to a T (the similarity of the Anti-Smoking Crusade and the War on Fat are not coincidental). I fear for the society we are becoming, schizophrenic, trying to be politically correct and oh so tolerant and a tyrannical nanny state all at the same time. Heaven help us all!

{A quick note added after stopping by several years later: Oakley's book is STILL definite five star material. Readers here will note that 7 of the 15 five star reviews here were written by named people who've given multiple book reviews over time. Compare that to the 7 reviewers that gave Oakley one star: Only two of them even bothered with pseudonyms, *NONE* of them ever reviewed any other Amazon book. ALL the one-star reviewers signed on simply to give the lowest rating possible to a book that they politically disagreed with and almost definitely did not read. In the case of this book Amazon's rating system has been badly abused: those one star reviews should be tossed out entirely and Oakley's book left with an almost pure five stars: one of the few on Amazon that would fit that category with multiple real reviewers.}

Now, my own Review, just as originally written on August 19th, 1999 -- twelve years ago:

The author has put together an incredible wealth of information gleaned from the internet, scientific studies, and newspaper articles and organised it with serious intent AND a sense of humor that makes it all readable!

He makes a VERY convincing case for the argument that a lot of the "information" that we see on the media about smoking and secondhand smoke is actually manufactured propaganda designed to achieve a "goal" of eliminating smoking not only in America but around the whole world.

He looks at things like the "400,000 killed by smoking" figure that we keep seeing in the news, and at the tactics of some of the extremist antismoking fanatics that have caused so much misery by splitting friends and families over false fears of harm from wisps of smoke.

This book ISN'T just for smokers! If you're a nonsmoker who's concerned about the "danger" you're in from other peoples' smoke you should read this book as well... you might find yourself surprised at some of the lies you've been told!

I think the thing I liked best about the book was its style: the author is SERIOUSLY annoyed (to put it mildly at the Antismokers and their manipulations of the facts and of peoples' fears and it comes through on every page. His personal touch makes the book VERY readable despite the quantity of information that he's managed to jam into it.

My only criticism would be the "cover art" of the book: it's too reminiscent of an Antismoking poster itself! Though it DOES illustrate the title quite nicely... :>

{New signature added Sept. 2011}
Michael J. McFadden
Author of Dissecting Antismokers' Brains

Before you kick another smoker out of another public place, or banish another friend or relative to the woodshed, you owe it to yourself--and your notions of yourself as a rational, fair-minded human being--to read this book. You may disagree, here or there, with a few of Mr.Oakley's personal thoughts, but you can't deny his solidly documented facts. In the war against smoking in which truth has, indeed, been the first casualty, Mr. Oakley goes a far way towards bringing it back to life.

I have followed the Anti-Smoker movement since the original public Health Service Report was issued 1-11-1964. Mr. Oakley covers the evolution of the reports conclusion calling for "appropriate remedial action" to todays fanatics that find tobacco causes every disease known to Mankind. This comprehensive tome is a must read for anyone with a desire to know how incremental propaganda can convince an entire society that 25% of the citizens are hopeless addicts. The optimistic conclusion of the Author is shared by me, there is no way this radical junkscience can sustain itself, because it is built on a pack of lies.

At one point while reading Slow Burn, an image of a towering anthill sprang to mind. Swarms of frenetic insects appeared, inexorably pursuing incomprehensible tasks, seemingly darting to and fro at random, bent on movement without thought, activity without purpose, completely bewildering the eye of the human beholder. I had to lay the book down and rub my eyes to expel the chaotic vision from my mind. The book's author, Don Oakley, had been reciting a list of anti-smoking studies that accused tobacco smoking of an endless list of human ailments from balding heads to halitosis. On and on the list went and with it went all aspects of reality. It really was too much but after a minute or two and several drags from my cigarette, I eagerly resumed my reading. Since becoming aware of the anti-smoking movement five years ago, I have resisted reading books that analyze and critique the phenomenon. Books exposing the greed and lies of the non-profit health charities or pointing out the dictatorial nature of today's public health establishment, have so disturbed my equilibrium that each new book fills me with dread since to read it will surely enrage. I'm happy to report that Slow Burn proved to be an exception to that rule. After completing it last weekend, I find myself optimistic that anti-smoking shall pass, as have other social pathologies. Don Oakley, a former newspaper editorial writer, has written a book that is encyclopedic in scope and is also thoroughly entertaining and accessible to readers ranging from those who know the anti-smoking movement well to those who only now are recognizing the dangers presented by a campaign of deception and fraud. Throughout, he casts a journalistic eye upon the statistical manipulation from which anti-tobacco arose and reduces the scientific mumbo jumbo to language any layman can comprehend without the eye-glazing denseness that so often accompanies technical subjects. Oakley begins his book on a historical note by examining the U.S. Surgeon General's 1964 Smoking and Health, the sacred scroll of the anti-smoking movement. To his surprise, he discovered how difficult it is to obtain what should be, considering its explosive impact on society, a report enshrined on tablets of gold. It's lack of availability, Oakley makes clear, is understandable since a careful reading of Smoking and Health reveals that the report was much ado about almost nothing. It's legacy, however, is profound in that it established the pattern of subsequent anti-smoking reports and studies that begin with anti-tobacco conclusions then contort the research to conform to the desired outcome. Each chapter progresses from that genesis to subsequent false orthodoxies such as the 400,000 deaths-per-year fraud, the convoluted redefining of addiction, the illogical notion of tobacco advertising as the cause of underage smoking and, of course, the colossal scientific scandal of the secondhand smoke studies. He examines the social and financial costs to our liberal society when social engineering replaces individualism and personal responsibility with an ideology of conformity and control. Interspersed throughout the horror of special interest deceit run amok, are Oakley's humorous and commonsensical observations of how reality tends to intrude on the unreality the anti-smokers have worked so hard to maintain. How, after all, does the tobacco settlement help the Washington State's Attorney General's "82-year-old mother who has been smoking since age 13"? From the hilarious logic-chopping tobacco studies, to cyber-sex smoking sites where forbidden fruit is tastiest, Oakley encapsulates 30 years of tobacco obsession into a highly enjoyable and personal voyage covering the golden era of smoking, when life was lived to the fullest, to the comical hypochondria that today reduces adults to quaking infants. On the way we laugh with him and come to share the optimism that anti-tobacco shall also pass. For five centuries Kings and Popes have futilely sought to dissuade their subjects from indulging in an innocuous pleasure that has enriched countless lives. What those potentates could not accomplish through capital punishment and excommunication, cannot not be accomplished by bogus statistics, nagging or dreary calls to self-denial. That the anti-smoking movement will end, Don Oakley is assured and his contention is backed by a historical perspective that places the current zanyism where it belongs; on its way to the trash heap. ". . . it too will become one of those episodes in history people wonder about and say, 'How did they let such foolishness go so far?'" That the foolishness has gone too far is a given, that books like Oakley's will hasten its end is assured.

This was an EXCELLENT book on this subject!

Unlike either the author I read, my background is many years spent in the aerospace industry as a designer. Although I'm not a statistician, and do not consider myself an expert in this subject, I DO have much more knowledge in this area than the average individual, as I did have to take two semesters of statistics, an invaluable course for anyone in modern society, as the most important part is not the knowledge of how to calculate statistics, but what sort of omissions (intentional or otherwise) can affect the, results and how data can be collected to support exactly opposite conclusions, merely by NOT mentioning other factors which might have a greater impact on whatever study is being undertaken.

It would be fairly easy to produce a study ( a real study, where you actually went out and acquired new data, not a "rehash" study where you just take data which is already lying around and run it through a different computer program) showing that NON-smokers were MORE likely to get cancer or heart disease or whatever than smokers! Unmentioned in the report, of course, will be that the sample of non-smokers was taken from the local jail and the sample of smokers was taken from those making over $50,000 year!

Hey, It's more "scientific" than the "study" based purely on a telephone survey!

I did already know, however, that at least some of the EPA reports were untrue, as back around 1993 (I do not remember the year or month, but do remember that it was televised starting around 1:00AM) I watched the EPA/Tobacco Company testimony before congress, and was about to puke to think that such EPA statistical shenanigans were being palmed off on a gullible public as "science".

Reminded me of 1986 when the "company" engineers said it was OK to launch Challenger, The REAL engineers (those who aren't going to fudge the data no matter WHAT the boss wants to see), were telling NASA that as they were already having problems with the "O" rings, that launching at a temperature lower than the design parameters of said "O" rings was sure to cause failure and loss of the Shuttle. The real engineers were ignored, and launch was made at the recommendation of those who said what the boss wanted to hear - we all know the result!

What I found among the more interesting items in Mr. Oakley's book were the reprints from the Appendix of the 1964 Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, so you could see the data for yourself, and if you know enough statistics, have to depend on neither the surgeon general nor Mr. Oakley for interpretation.

By the time you get through "with assumptions which are not true in this case" which "to avoid, makes other asssumptions which are shaky" and further down you find that some of THOSE "asssumptions are unknown so approximations must be made" you realize that what all the formula are in there for is to provide a "scientific" way of saying, We THINK this is harmful, but really haven't a clue!

These are direct quotes from the appendix with the exception that where I have written assumption with an extra "s" there is a reference to mathematical formula.

50,000 studies?, I wouldn't believe 50 MILLION studies unless I saw a representative example of the data and statistics used to arrive at the conclusions, and so far, the data from the few I have seen seems to vary from well intentioned (those who at least made some attempt to stay within the acceptable parameters of statistics, but left too many variables hanging for real conclusions) to downright statistical charlatanism as in the EPA's testimony before Congress regarding second-hand smoke, and the SAMMEC data, which is pure GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. Example: If the data entry clerk left the last zero off your paycheck, you will be unhappy, no matter how accurately the FICA and witholding were calculated!

Furthermore, I would value highly the opinion of a mathematician who spent 18 years in R&D at the Bureau of Standards, designed some of the early computer logic circuits, and then worked for the National Institute of Health. Nobody's going to palm off any "junk science" on an individual with THAT kind of background, as after a couple decades of trying to define standards, ones mind set tends to first ask "how accurate is that!" When such an individual has problems with certain data, I have problems with that data!

Mr. Oakley is perhaps a little easy on the anti-smoking crowd, and WAY to easy on the EPA, which we pay to give us real data and not junk science justification for social engineering! They should be ashamed of themselves!

When we know the tobacco companies lie. When the EPA uses junk statistics to lie even bigger, where is an individual who wants accurate data, impartially analyzed, on the subject to go? Nowhere on THIS earth!

SLOW BURN: The Great American Antismoking Scam (And Why it Will Fail) by Don Oakley

In 600 pages Mr. Oakley, a retired editorial writer, manages to touch on just about every aspect of the anti-smoking crusade with devastating effect. If you thought Judge Osteen was hard on the EPA's 1993 ETS report, wait until you hear what Oakley has to say about it.

All in all he is able to open up new vistas, even for those who may have spent some time studying the subject. For instance, his chapter on "Cigarette Sirens: The Erotic Angle," was an eyeopener for me. I had no idea the fetish even existed, much less that it is apparently booming. (Wait until the righteous anits get ahold of that!)

The book, a labor of four years, carries copious reference notes. He also has a way of citing from his own experience and that of others he knows which contradicts lifeless anti-smoking statistics with human reality.

The book is finding much enthusiastic support among those who have read it. It should definitely be on your "must read" list.

This book is well written, well researched, and politically incorrect: Everything I like in a book ! Anti-smoking zealots are threatening the civil liberties that all of us enjoy in the USA. Their campaign is similar to other 'witch hunts' of the past: The Inguistion in Spain, the witch trials in the US colonies, the McCarthy era hunt for Commies, etc. With loads of Pseudo Science to urge them on, the anti-smokers are helping to drive the tobacco industry into the waiting arms of Organized Crime syndicates, all too skilled at supplying inelastic demands, as there are for tobacco & nicotine. Tobacco takes the blame for a host of modern day maladies, yet even in these 'high tech' times of medical research & diagnosis, the only way smokers can be identified is to ask them. Dispite what the politically correct want, 1.2 billion people in this world enjoy smoking every day.....just as native cultures around the globe have for 1000s of years. Read it !